What I learned from Studying 100 Internal Chrome Extensions

I've always been extremely fascinated with Browser Extensions and end-user customization of software. As work apps and tools move from the desktop to the browser (Figma, Airtable, Roam, etc.) being able to add/remove custom features and/or create contextual tools is becoming more and more powerful.

With this premise, two friends and I wanted to explore if there was a market for custom internal extensions at companies. Think visual low code internal tool builders (Retool, AppSmith, Budibase) but for Chrome Extensions.

To better understand the value of internal browser extensions, we combed through the Chrome Extension store, searching for internal extensions with these keywords in the description: "internal, internal tool, internal company, corporate use, employees of, for * employees." Note: most companies don't publish their internal extensions publicly; their extensions are usually "unlisted" or accessible only by users of a specific domain.

Here is a summary of the top 100 most interesting internal extensions we found!

What problems are developers trying to solve?

• Provide better access to internal information to do their jobs in the right context. Chrome extensions are a good way to surface internal company data in the right context of the webpage. These data can come from custom knowledge bases, FAQs, support runbooks, company personnel directories and more! These data can be used by all employees or specific teams like devs or support
• Streamline a tedious and/or error-prone browser process. No one likes repetition. We saw a few clever devs use Chrome extensions to manipulate frontend UI elements to perform actions on the page. An example: a dev used a chrome extension to do mass permission changes, synchronize settings across repos, close stale pull requests, and delete merged branches on GitHub.
• Removing the need of hosting a frontend for my internal tool. It's much easier to deploy an internal tool as an extension. No need to worry about a server!
• Bring other tools into the current context. One thing chrome extension does really well is bridge data between different tools. One dev built a chrome extension for his sales team that pulls corresponding account data from CRM and displays them in a separate UI element on LinkedIn. This tool saved colleagues in sales teams from having to look up a person in Salesforce every time they come across a new lead on LinkedIn.
• Various special developer tools for testing and debugging. Some examples we’ve seen include: full-page screenshot, custom element inspection tool and etc.

Value of internal extensions for different Orgs

Support

• improve quality of support
• check and update tickets efficiently
• runbook style list of actions
• adds markdown to ticketing system

HR

• enforce corporate compliance
• look up employees at any time
• clock in/clock out
• pingboard for HR
• (recruiting) denoting certain candidates has already been reached out to

Engineering

• Surfacing analytics based on current context
• exposing bug reports in console
• simulating events and activities for debugging

Productivity

• tracking time spending
• List of resources (like go links)
• Company specific startup page
• data entry
• list of internal resources

Sales

• improve efficiency. quickly add things into CRM
• Salesforce UI modification

Breakdown of 100 internal extensions by functionality

Note: these categories are not mutually exclusive. Some extensions/internal tools may fall into more categories, but most do not.

• knowledge sharing: exposing data in the right context (READ) to remove context switching

  19 instances

• frontend automations/form filling/take actions

  9 instances

• UI modification + additional functionality on existing tooling

  17 instances

• Scraping

  3 instances

• Integrations used in context (CRUD)

  24 instances

• developer focused tools: PR/debugging and etc.

  14 instances

• Internal productivity functionality (credential saving and etc., rather vague)

  19 instances

• Analytics and tracking

  6 instances

Summary

This was a fascinating exercise to see what kind of internal extensions that companies were already building.

We've since taken what we learned and started designing + building a platform to make it easier to build internal extensions! Aptly named extension.dev 🥳. We just opened our developer preview and would love to help you harness the power of the browser! 👇 here's a screenie

Also, you can follow along our journey here (we are trying to build in public) or on Twitter.